Richard Serra
The sculptor of steel.
Richard Serra made huge curved steel plates that you walk into and feel with your body.
Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco. His father worked in a shipyard, and Serra has said that as a child he watched a ship being launched and that the sense of that enormous weight suddenly floating became the foundation of his art. He paid for his studies by working in steel mills. He read English literature at the University of California and then studied art at Yale, where among other things he helped Josef Albers with the book Interaction of Color.
After study trips to Paris and Italy, Serra settled in New York in 1966. There he drew up a list of verbs, such as to roll, to fold, to cut and to splash, and used it as a working programme. He threw molten lead into the corner between floor and wall and leaned heavy lead plates against each other without fixings, as in One Ton Prop (House of Cards) of 1969. The works stood only through balance, and the viewer sensed the danger.
From the 1970s he worked mainly in rolled steel on a gigantic scale. His most controversial work was Tilted Arc of 1981, a leaning steel wall 37 metres long in Federal Plaza in New York. Many people who worked there felt it was in the way, and after public hearings it was dismantled in 1989. Serra protested, arguing that a site-specific work is destroyed if it is moved.
In the 1990s came the Torqued Ellipses and later spirals that you walk into. The spaces widen and narrow, the walls lean, and the body grows uncertain of where it is. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao houses the installation The Matter of Time of 2005, with eight large works. In the Qatari desert East-West/West-East was erected in 2014, four steel plates spread over more than a kilometre. Serra also made large black drawings in oilstick.
Serra was married to the art historian Clara Weyergraf-Serra. He died in 2024 at his home on Long Island. He is regarded as one of the greatest sculptors of his time. His view that sculpture is something experienced with the body, in time and movement, and not just an object to look at, has shaped both sculpture and architecture.